Z of Life

Death was the reward that Greece presented to Socrates for thinking freely and teaching others to do the same. Those who teach people faster than they can learn are doomed. And people don’t really learn much. Socrates was not understood by the ordinary folk of Greece. So they wanted him to die. Socrates could have got a longer life had he apologised. Apologise to whom? The ordinary people whom he had always held in contempt. No, he would never do that. “Give me the hemlock,” he demanded.

They put in him prison till the hour of his death. His influential friends visited him in prison and told him that he could still escape; they had bribed all the officials who stood between him and liberty. Socrates was 70. He knew he didn’t have much time left anyway. Why not die honourably then? “Give me the hemlock.”

The jailer brought the poison and apologised. He did not wish to kill “the noblest and gentlest and best of all who ever came to this place.” But he had to obey orders. Socrates answered, “I return your good wishes.” He took the cup of poison and drank it. Death crept up his feet. He could feel his body going numb. “When the poison reaches the heart, that will be the end,” Socrates said to the few friends who were present in the jail-cell.

“Crito, I owe a cock to Asclepius; will you remember to pay the debt?” Crito agreed instantly. “Is there anything else?” There was no answer. The great philosopher of Greece was dead, killed by his own people for the offence of teaching them to think.

Let us fast-forward the time to 30 April 1945, 23 centuries after the death of Socrates. In a bunker in Berlin, a man who aimed to become the emperor of the world shoots himself. He had imagined himself as the Messiah of mankind. He wanted to purify humanity by exterminating the impure races. The world shall have only the Aryans, the purest race of people. His messianic dreams led to the death of 53 lakh German soldiers, 6.5 lakh citizens, and 60 lakh Jews. The World War 2 killed about 8 crore people in the world. One man’s dreams turned out to be quite costly for mankind.

Just two days prior to Hitler’s death, another man who had imagined himself as a Messiah, Benito Mussolini, had been put to death by the people of his country. He was hanged upside down. This ruler who had imagined himself to be far greater than what he really was died like a coward. History records that just before death, Mussolini’s “face was like wax and his stare glassy, but somehow blind…. Mussolini seemed completely lacking in will, spiritually dead.”

Death is inevitable. But one can die like Socrates with pride and dignity instead of ending as a coward like the dictators.

Old age is a time when people look back at their own life – how satisfying or fulfilling has it been? Many things might have gone wrong. They do. That’s how life is. But there are many things that give us a sense of fulfilment. Something that makes us feel that our life was fruitful in spite of the fact that many people might not have liked us. Even Socrates had haters. But Socrates died with a sense of fulfilment. Hitler couldn’t do that. Mussolini couldn’t.

What we do with our life matters much in how we are going to die. Death need not be bad at all. Death is a relief. A release.

“What does a good death look like?” Eric Weiner asks in his book The Socrates Express. “It usually (but not always) comes at the end of a good life” [emphasis added]. Weiner gives us the example of philosopher Michel de Montaigne.

The year is 1569. Thirty-six-year-old Montaigne is riding a horse. It’s a docile horse that he is highly used to. Then comes another rider, astride a powerful workhorse, riding at a supersonic speed. An accident occurs. This express rider hits Montaigne’s horse with all his strength and weight. Montaigne is thrown off his horse. He is there now on the ground bruised and bleeding and motionless. People think he is dead.

But he is not dead. He vomits blood profusely. He thinks he is going to die. He closes his eyes and takes pleasure in letting himself go, as if sliding gently into sleep. “If this is death, Montaigne thought, it’s not so bad, not bad at all.” Montaigne later wrote about the “infinite sweetness” of that experience. It would have been “a very happy death,” he wrote.

Montaigne died in 1592 at the age of 59. An infected tonsil was the cause. Montaigne who loved good conversations had to die in utter silence because of the illness. But he died happily. A friend of his wrote that Montaigne “tasted and took death with sweetness.” One of the last things he did was to summon his household staff and pay them their inheritance. He was a good man.

How you die is often determined by how you live. Not as a rule, of course. We can view death as more benign than a catastrophe or something. “As something beautiful and inevitable,” as Montaigne puts it. Acceptance is the secret. Accept the simple fact that death is our inevitable end. Learn to smile at that and there you are – free to climb the peaks and cross the ravines. 

PS. This post is the last part of #BlogchatterA2Z 2023

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